Much before business became technology and vice versa, the CIO was just the custodian of technology. IT departments were the slow-moving bureaucratic lot. But CIOs and their teams have travelled quite far from that point. Today, CIOs are acting as key business strategists, helping businesses transform and grow. 

Meet a CIO, who also successfully led several business roles, including that of a CEO of a multinational firm’s India business –  Muralidharan Ramachandran.

This former CEO of Atos India offers a handful of lessons on what it takes to be the “CEO of your own career” (to borrow his own words).

In this exclusive interaction with CIO Dimension, Murali explores some key aspects that today’s CIOs must consider, including the changing talent scenario, new opportunities around digital transformation and also on working with startups. 

Watch the full video here: 

Before becoming the CEO of Atos India, Murali worked as the CIO of Syntel (later acquired by Atos) for over 8 years. He also moved onto other responsibilities as vice president later during his stint at Syntel, in the areas of quality assurance and cybersecurity. Before moving out of Atos in 2022, Murali became the vice president of Growing markets for the company’s key services. 

In his two-decade long leadership journey of great diversity, Murali has acquired the rare skill of striking the balance between technology and business.

He believes that the biggest challenge for a CIO going forward will be to ‘filter out the noise’ amidst the overwhelming technology options. “Today you have the option to choose any technology that you want. But the tricky part for CIOs will be how they can take the whole organization along in the journey and manage change. CIO will need to be a big ‘change-manager’ rather than being a hard-core technologist” he says. 

In this conversation, Murali also takes us through the evolving talent landscape where the industry transitioned from the traditional SDLC models to agile methodologies and how it drove a big change for tech leaders. He explains why the current mass layoffs in the tech sector are a result of imprudence and why companies need more sustainable models for talent acquisition and management. 

He believes that a CIO’s digital investments will be strictly evaluated based on the four fundamental business criteria – revenue growth, cost optimization, customer experience and regulatory challenges. “The CIO has to choose her battles wisely,” he sums up. 

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The Generative AI era has dawned – thanks to the potential and promises shown by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.  Over the last few months, there have been frenzied discussions around how generative AI can potentially revolutionize the way people and businesses work and innovate. 

As new offerings and advances abound in this area, so is the funding for generative AI startups across the globe. According to a report by CB Insights, ‘2022 was a record year for investment in generative AI startups, with equity funding topping $2.6B across 110 deals.’ 

In India, generative AI startup space is indeed yet to bloom. Only small percentage of the investments has so far come to Indian startups. That said, the Indian generative AI startup ecosystem is not far behind when it comes to innovation and distinctiveness. 

There are several startups in this space, but here are a few Indian companies to watch out for as generative AI continues to break new grounds. 

Rephrase.ai: This Bangalore-based startup is an AI-powered synthetic video creation platform that converts plain text into hyper-personalized video. The company has already generated over 250,000 video content and has worked with over 50 enterprise clients. The company is co-founded by Ashray Malhotra, Nisheeth Lahoti and Shivam Mangla in 2018. 

Gan studio: Gan studio’s Myna platform helps businesses build hyper-personalized video marketing campaigns through generative AI. Gan’s mission is to democratize personalized video creation. Myna has been used by a number of brands already including Swiggy, Zomato, Vivo, Bajaj and Samsung. Gan was founded in March 2021 by Suvrat Bhooshan and is headquartered in New Delhi.

Peppertype.ai: Peppertype.ai, launched by content production firm Pepper Content, is a virtual content assistant  that lets you create high-converting content in seconds. The platform is being used by 250,000+ individuals in brands such as Flikart, Cred, Disney Hotstar, Spotify etc. 

Kroop.ai: Founded by  Dr. Jyoti Joshi, Kroop.ai is a deep tech startup that has developed a sophisticated audio-visual deep learning platform. Its platform The Artiste generates high quality videos with digital avatars with just audio or text as input. Its ethical audio-visual data generation technology is combined with multimodal and explainable deepfakes detection. 
Beatoven.ai: Bengaluru-based Beatoven.ai is a music-tech startup that uses advanced AI music generation techniques to compose unique mood-based music for video or podcast content. Launched in 2021 by Mansoor Rahimat Khan and Siddharth Bhardwaj, the platform is used by individual creators as well as production houses, metaverse companies and agencies.

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Merchant commerce omnichannel company, Pine Labs announced that it has acquired a proprietary enterprise platform from Bengaluru-based Saluto Wellness. This acquisition will boost the capabilities of Pine Labs’ Issuing Business under the Qwikcilver brand, enabling it to strengthen its offerings across employee rewards and recognition, customer loyalty programs, and channel partner programs for medium and large enterprises.

Pine Labs has a leading presence in India in prepaid, stored value, and gift card solutions through its 2019 acquisition of Qwikcilver, an entity that merged with Pine Labs in September 2022. Saluto Wellness was co-founded by Siva Kumar and Anoop Nambiar in 2017.

Kumar Sudarsan, President, Issuing Business, Pine Labs, said “With Saluto’s platform, we expect to further enhance our leadership across Enterprise Rewards, Recognition, Incentive & Engagement programs. Saluto’s multi-tenant, enterprise grade offering will give us additional capabilities complementing our strengths…”

“Our enterprise solutions are today being used across diverse industry verticals and we are excited to become part of a fast-growing, progressive fintech like Pine Labs and together scale our business further. We have already established a good working relationship with the Pine Labs team and look forward to being a driving force to further Pine Labs’ leadership in this space with innovative outcomes,”

K. Siva Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of Saluto Wellness.

The loyalty program market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of ~15% over the next decade, and projected to reach US$ 10.8 billion by 2031, from nearly US$ 3Bn in 2022, as per Future Market Insights. ¹

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